


Rescue the Wild

by 3kmicrowav



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Gen, Some people are animals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-27
Updated: 2018-07-27
Packaged: 2019-06-17 06:19:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,583
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15455217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/3kmicrowav/pseuds/3kmicrowav
Summary: No, they're no longer in a space station - they're in a wildlife rescue station! Julian is just doing his vet job in the jungle and chilling with some animal (maybe not-so-friendly) friends.





	Rescue the Wild

Julian Bashir was just hanging his backpack to the door and suddenly felt that something was not right. He had his gaze swept from the coat rack to the exam table at the side of the wall, then from the foam mat to the UV lamp, and finally locked it on the rat cage - the door was open.

"Come on, not this again!" He clenched his fists, strode to the office next door and, gently knocked. No one answered, of course. It’s still too early. He squatted down and flipped the cat door open to take a peek inside. The sun was not out yet and the blinds were not up, so there’s not much for him to see inside the office beyond a blur of darkness. He called out to the seemly uninhabited room, "Odo, are you in there?" He blew some meowing imitation through the hole.

Someone’s foot materialized from behind and nudged his butt. Julian turned his head and saw his colleague standing behind him with no judgemental expression aside from her pursed lips. She had a bag on the left shoulder, one hand in her pocket; the other hand was carrying a cat named Odo, who would never meow in the way Julian did. Instead, Odo always had this cold distain in his eyes. He grumbled as usual, a muffled thunder rolling downwards his throat.

Julian stood up with a hand on the door, mumbling something between "Morning Kira" and "Your cat probably ate my lab rat (again)".

Out of any other reactions a normal human being would produce, Kira talked to her cat. "Have you eaten Dr. Julian's rat?" She was stroking the fur on that cat's head. Odo just snorted and twitched his ears, noncommittal.

After walking into the crime scene, Kira pointed at the cage. "How can any cat pick this kind of lock?"

Julian reminded her, "Do you remember the parrot last time..."

"The cage was not locked last time!" Kira folded her arm. Odo stretched his paws to land on the ground without a sound, and started to wander around as if he owned the place, which was mostly true.

Kira continued, "If I were you, I’d go check my infirmary. Isn’t there a better way to chase mouse running around instead of accusing an innocent cat?" She picked up Odo from the floor, "Anyway, if the rat problem is getting serious, you are still welcome to borrow him."

Julian looked at Kira’s back upon her leaving. The cat had his head resting on her shoulder with a faint but unmistakable smug expression. Julian sighed heavily, took the vacuum cleaner out of the cupboard and started to vacuum.

Tilting the curtains and the sun had not fully risen yet. South America was much warmer than UK, and seemed to have no winter comparing to it. Only the timing shift of the sunrise could remind him of the change of the season. Not until had he finished cleaning the infirmary did he buckled up the button on the blue vet uniform, and the sky were brightening up, finally. He held a writing pad under his armpit and walked towards the shelter area.

He only saw the back of the deck chair through the duty room window and already knew Jake was on duty and completely passed out. This poor boy was still holding an iPad in his lap, his neck craned in a way Julian would very much like to wake him up for a position that would not leave permanent damage to his adolescent bone structure. But Julian couldn't bear to wake him up from the sweet dream, instead, he stretched his arm through the hole on the window to swipe his ID card. Unfortunately, the high-pitched beeping when the card was swiped still woke up the young man. Jake blinked and frowned, rubbed his neck, then managed to smile at Julian after remembering where he was.

Julian felt quite sorry for this young man. He knew Jake was working here not because he was enthusiastic about rescuing wild animals, nor to make his college application documents look pretty. He’s here only because between his dad and granddad, he still rather not stay with the later one during the summer vacation. Every summer vacation. He had been fed up with plucking chicken in his grandfather's legendary kitchen and would rather do some volunteering job continent away in his father's rescue station - although sometimes he still had to help process the chicken that was going to be feed to the animals.

Jake turned his cap around to cover his face and laid back, passed out again. Julian walked into the open shelter area and saw Kira was already here in front of the gate. Her cat was no longer with her, although replaced by an even larger cat, Jadzia. The jaguar clinging to the cage turned her head and seemed eager to greet him. Julian was about to wave to her, but immediately found it dumb and shoved his hand back to the pocket before anyone saw him and laughed.

Jadzia had already finished her meal and was licking her paws. She seemed to let her guard down enough now. When the patrol team sent her here last month, the wound on her abdomen was so bad that Julian had to cut off part of her stomach.

Kira helped during the examination of the recovery on Jadzia’s wounds – she’s almost good to go, returning to the jungle where she belonged. For now she’s just resting her chin on Kira's thighs and squinted like a domestic cat in the lazy aftermath of anesthetic and Kira’s scratches on her neck.

Kira was certificated to be good with cats, but not always so lucky with other animals: The tapir named Morn almost knocked and ran over her; that nest of leaf-nosed bats tried to shit over her shirt while being released to the wild; many years ago, before Julian and many other staff had arrived, before the rescue station was even officially built up, she was already in the patrol team, rescuing animals from poachers. But after being bitten by a crocodile and adding ten stitches on the leg, she simply refused to deal with those fierce reptiles alone.

Worf walked over from the door with a giant black plastic bag on his back like an alternative version of Santa Claus, in his daily attire of straw hat and greased apron and sometimes protective gears on the legs, when he needed to pull some difficult residents out of their cage or pool. Even when he was wearing a black tie to an international meeting, other people still wouldn’t mistake the nature of his job with the scar on his forehead – or maybe they would? Julian heard that Worf used to be in the patrol team, but rumours also said that he lost his wife on that post, to the jungle or to the civilized world. Julian was too intimidated to ask.

Julian was just filling Jadzia’s medical record against the fence when Sisko also entered with a trolley, two big black bags aboard. WWF assigned him here to boss around the station, but in the field, his job of standing behind the chopping board to prepare food for friends, human or animal, made him look indifferent from any other ordinary worker.

Julian walked with them and waited while they were carefully lowering the chicken with long sticks and ropes to the crocodile pool.

"Are they awake yet though?" Julian looked at the pool of stagnant water.

A month ago, the patrol team sent them nine dying crocodiles. One didn’t make it to the station. After the intense surgery session, they were accommodated with the shelter for follow-up inspections. Oddly, while the bullet wounds were generally recovering, new scars were starting to appear. Somehow they fumbled their way into the jail fight. They took the most troublesome one out of the water (Worf used his protective gear) and detained it separately.

"So… how longer need they stay here, doctor?" Worf didn’t turn his attention from the water. As soon as the chicken made the contact to the surface of the pool, those crocodiles, seemly perfect still at first, all started to emerge from the mud and crawl to the chicken, snatching and splashing, then disappearing to the underwater with their trophies. "This month's budget has doubled. We are going to apply for extra allowance if keep these animals two weeks longer." He took his purchase and finance part of work very seriously, and delivered Julian a stare that meant to be sincere but landed menacingly.

"Well, not until Mile’s back! We need him to put these bad boys on the tracker." Julian tapped his writing pad with the ballpen. "And another two or three days for observation – then they can go, I think."

"So, another month." Worf snorted and returned eyes to the pond, probably doing the calculation and filing in his mind. Sisko was at the other side of the pool, dropping chickens when several crocodiles climbed ashore to compete for it. He yelled and kicked the wired fence when some of these bastards tried to go for the bag in his hand.

Worf was not for talk, and Sisko always talked to him in the same way he talked to Jake. Julian’s only friend (he guessed!) at work was Miles O'Brien, who was having his time of the year in North America. For one thing, it really did no good for someone with that pale Irish skin to stay in the tropics for too long – he hid himself in the workshop or the truck to do his maintenance work but still ended up burning like a steamed shrimp. Now he was living in his wife’s university dormitory in California, as was he confided in the e-mail, and California still had him boiled on daily basis. He also talked about the progress on Keiko’s research on Amazon rainforest – he was here solely because of this at first - and leaving his daughter with her grandparents in Hokkaido made him very uneasy because she was reported to be refusing to do math homework.

Jake was already over the problem with his math homework, instead he’s struggling for a scholarship from literary award. Julian learnt that he was writing a fantasy YA novel in the duty room, about the pyramid and the totem worship and the tribal war and something hopefully not culturally inappropriate.

At the age of Jake, Julian was already in the pre-med program and became the pride of his parents until he changed his major to veterinary medicine. He answered their call, but dealing with a pair of angry parents who flew all across the ocean to confront him was still too much. So when they arrived at his apartment, Julian had already assigned himself to a fully-funded summer school and sneaked away one step ahead.

"They felt that, like, everything was their fault," he said to Miles, legs on the tea table. "Because of their educational negligence, I lost my love for the whole mankind, and turned my love to the opposite of humanity. Nature. See? That’s where their problem is."

Miles was too busy sweating and fixing the central AC to comment his whining.

Julian didn’t expect bigger problems other than language barrier before coming to Peru after ending that extra Spanish course with a worrisome B+, but that seemed to be alright since local workers were not patient enough to hear his babbling and instead talked to him in fluent English. The real problem here and now was far more subtle and indefinite – he’s lonely. He returned to Uni every term to report the progress of the project and wrestled with the board for funding, messing around in SOHO for a week or two, and that's it. Other than that, his connection to the world was very limited, including the Instagram account he set up for this underrated wildlife rescue station, with 175 followers for Odo pictures or shit.

So far, his research on wildlife collective intelligence was a bit frustrating. The ethical guideline required him to observe more than perform actual experiment on endangered animals. Those injured animals stared at him, too, on the exam table, or in the darkest night, behind the wire, when he walked past them in the night patrol. Sometimes it felt like they had built a mutual understanding without a word, but sometimes they were stupid enough to eat up an entire coke can or any other junks tourists tossed into the wild. For now Julian had narrowed his study scope to the intelligence influence on their social structure, and honestly? He felt blessed to have a pool of crocodiles from the same gene pool, and secretly glad to keep them for another month without being unprofessional.

The crocodile, which was confined separately, had been playing dead for many days and unresponsive even to the feeding. He was sent earlier than other crocodiles, and had several slight ethnic differences. The station had encountered similar situations before, but the isolated individual could always compromise with the leader sooner or later and eventually integrated into the group, unlike this time. They seemed to disagree from the bottom of their crocodile heart, and Worf had to drag one away before the final duel took place.

Worf stretched his picker into the isolated area for the chicken that hadn’t been eaten for several days. It’s started to attract fliers. "Is that normal?" Worf asked while doing what Julian required him to do, shoving the crocodile into the cage. "This one was quite eager for food before. Is he dying?"

"Nah, probably eaten something bad." Julian adjusted the pulley and helped push the crocodile cage through the shelter area with Worf.

"Just like last time," Worf suggested. "That tapir was diagnosed with depression, but in fact swallowed a couple of coins."

"I'm afraid this one would not go through gastric lavage as that peaceful." Julian felt the crocodile moving a little in the cage.

The results of the exam were quite unexpected. Firstly, just after opening the cage, the crocodile immediately stopped pretending to be dead, thrashing all the way down the ramp with his four tiny legs, and then was dragged and strapped to the exam table. Secondly, Julian did not detect any foreign matter in the stomach by probing, so he took a while to turn on that ancient set of X-ray machines for a further, thorough examination. He was quite appalled to find out a pre-installed tracker in place. This meant this crocodile was sent to one of the rescue stations before, but the tracker had lost its signal, so made it possible for him to wander out of the monitoring area and into the active area of the poachers.

The worse thing was, the tracker had somehow penetrated his subcutaneous and muscle tissues and pressed into his nervous system. Julian quickly decided to perform a surgical removal and called his local assistant Jabara. Jabara, meanwhile in Lima, apologized for not being able to come back in at least two days.

"His tissue fluid concentration is already too low and surgery must be done as soon as possible." Julian said across the phone. "He is dying."

"I can't help you from here," she said. "Even if I can offer you some advice on the phone, you still have to operate alone."

Julian nodded slowly, "Then I have to make do."

 

(??end??)

**Author's Note:**

> I... idk, is this problematic tho? no more problematic than the sentinel right??? anyway i posted it,,, just another weird au you didn't ask for,,, btw tng crew is the one patrolling for poacher activities


End file.
